Show us your vintage B&W sets!

[bgadow]

I wanted to share some of my recent finds. Yep, stuff still comes out of the woodwork, even when you don't look too hard!

The first 2 are from a weekend getaway we took recently to Pennsylvania. The others I got from a local tube audio collector who I often swap with.

1) This turned up at the Zern's Farmers/Flea Market, not too far from Pottstown (Douglasville?). An indoor vendor had this for $10. An attractive color, I feel, and a brand that doesn't show up much (my first): Olympic. Someone posted a similiar set earlier this year, but I didn't search enough to find it. I don't know if the other one was an Olympic but the thing they have in common is that they are made in Japan. Very American in design. Heavily built with a wrinkle finish on the metal portion of the cabinet. UHF seems to be an afterthought but at least it's there. The set powered up but with only a partial raster & nothing but static for audio.

2) This was at an inside booth at Renniger's Adamstown Flea Market. Wow, what a place! The best one we hit. The vendor was gone but luckily his neighbor was watching the booth. It is an Emerson with a solid bakelite cabinet, paint-speckled but in good overall shape. The crt had a brightener-it tests just mediocre after a good warmup. Worth the $20 I paid, I would say.

3) This is a CBS Columbia 17" table model in a metal cabinet, in good overall condition. My friend who found it said it initially sold at auction for an unbelievable $150. Shortly thereafter it showed up in another auction house, where he was able to buy it for just a few dollars. That shows the fickle nature of this hobby, I guess. Nothing real exciting about the TV except perhaps the label on the back. No surprise that CBS would be pushing its system like that. There is a socket on the back & additional label (let me know if anyone is interested in a photo of it); there are a few wires running to that socket, which has a cap over it.

4) My first Olympic, my first CBS TV, now my first Setchell-Carlson. An odd way to make a 19" portable, for sure, but then S-C like to do things different. The cabinet is a little beat up and there are some scratches in the CRT face, so this won't be a "museum piece". I thought this was early sixties but then I saw the address on the back has a zip code so I guess they made these later on.

[Bobby Brady]

I suspect that pink Olympic to be extremely rare in such beautiful condition.

That sticker announcing the color TV adaptor is the most interesting to me. That must be the rarest thing of all to find in that area of stuff. I suspect that 3 color sticker was at the bottom left of the picture tube when new and someone put it in the back? Does anybody remember seeing one on a showroom floor?